conventions in his novels—a sketch of these essentials will clearly point up the contrast between the classical and the realistic mystery story.

Hammett’s familiarity with the classical paradigm is established in the seventy-odd reviews of detective novels he wrote for the Saturday Review and the New York Evening Post between 1927 and 1930, and his rejection of it is thorough. In fact, he specifically contrasted his notion of the detective with that of Doyle in describing Sam Spade (a description that is applicable to the Op as well):For your private detective does not . . . want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client.

Rather than a tall, thin, refined, and somewhat mysterious amateur such as Sherlock Holmes, who relies entirely on his powers of reasoning and deduction to clear up mysteries, Hammett’s Continental Op is distinctly unglamorous and anti-intellectual. The Op is nearing forty, about five and a half feet tall, and weighing 190 pounds; he works as a modestly paid employee of the Continental Detective Agency, modeled loosely on the Pinkerton organization. Though certainly not stupid, the Op relies on routine police procedures and direct, often violent action to force criminals into the open, rather than on elaborate chains of deductive logic. The colorful and eccentric Sherlock Holmes (even his name is striking), with his violin, cocaine, and recondite scientific interests, is replaced by the anonymous and colorless Op, with no history, hobbies, or interests outside his work and no social life beyond an occasional poker game with police officers or other operatives. As he remarks in a 1925 short story, “The Gutting of Couffingnal,” in his most extensive discussion of his ideas about his work,Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. . . . I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. . . . You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it. You might just as well expect a hound to play tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught.

Red Harvest

In Red Harvest (1927-1928), the first of the novels featuring the Op, a character comments directly on the disparity between the methods of the Op and those of his more refined and cerebral predecessors:“So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My God! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled pig-headed guy you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.” “Plans are all right sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.”

Hammett humorously underscored the difference in methods in a 1924 short story, “The Tenth Clew,” which parodies the classical detective plot with a set of nine bewildering clues, including a victim missing his left shoe and collar buttons, a mysterious list of names, and a bizarre murder weapon (the victim was beaten to death with a bloodstained typewriter). The solution, the “tenth clew,” is to ignore all nine of these confusing and, as it turns out, phony clues and use routine methods such as the surveillance of suspects to find the killer. The Op relies on methodical routine, long hours, and action to get results, not on inspiration and ratiocination. Rather than presenting a brilliant alternative to ineffectual police methods, the Op works closely with the police and often follows their standard procedures.

As the detective is different, so are the crimes and criminals. The world of the traditional mystery is one of security and regularity, disrupted by the aberrant event of the crime. Once the detective solves the crime through the application of reason, normalcy is restored. This worldview was clearly a comfortable one from the point of view of the turn-of-the-century British Empire. The world of the hard-boiled detective is one in which criminal behavior constitutes the norm, not the aberrance. There are usually several crimes and several criminals, and the society is not an orderly one temporarily disrupted but a deeply corrupt one that will not be redeemed or even much changed after the particular set of crimes being investigated is solved. One of the chapters in Red Harvest is titled “The Seventeenth Murder” (in serial publication it had been the nineteenth), and the string has by no means ended at that point. The criminals include a chief of police and a rich client of the Op, not only gangsters, and the Op himself arranges a number of murders in playing off rival gangs against one another. Indeed, it is only at the very end that the reader, along with the Op himself, learns that he did not commit the seventeenth murder while drugged. At the novel’s close, most of the characters in the book are either dead or in prison. Rather than emphasize the solution of the crime—the murder that the Op is originally called in to investigate is solved quite early in the book—the novel emphasizes the corruption of the town of Personville and its corrupting effects on the people who enter it, including the detective himself. Many critics point to the critique of capitalist society of this early work as evidence of Hammett’s Marxist views.

The Maltese Falcon

Though he appeared only in The Maltese Falcon and a few short stories, Sam Spade has become Hammett’s most famous creation, largely because of Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of him in John Huston’s faithful film version (the third made of the book). Hammett’s decision to shift to an entirely objective third-person narration for The Maltese Falcon removes even the few traces of interpretation and analysis provided by the Op and makes the analysis of the character of the detective himself the central concern of the reader. The question is not “who killed Miles Archer, Spade’s partner?” but “what kind of man is Sam Spade?” In fact, Archer’s death is unlikely to be of much concern to readers until they are reminded of it at the end, when Spade turns over to the police his lover, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, as the murderer. The reasoning behind Spade’s solution makes it fairly clear that he has known of her guilt from the start, before they became lovers, and leaves open the question of whether he has really fallen in love but is forced by his code to turn her in or whether he has been cold-bloodedly manipulating her all along. Spade’s delay in solving the case may also be interpreted variously: Is he crooked himself, hoping to gain money by aiding the thieves in the recovery of a priceless jeweled falcon, or is he merely playing along with them to further his investigation? After all, it is only after the falcon proves worthless that Spade reports the criminals. Spade was having an affair with his partner’s wife (he dislikes them both), and he frequently obstructs the police investigation up to the moment when he solves the case. Clearly, the mystery of the novel resides in character rather than plot.

The Glass Key

Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, does not even include a detective and is as much a psychological novel as a mystery. Again, it is the protagonist, this time Ned Beaumont, a gambler and adviser to mob leaders, whose character is rendered opaque by the rigorously objective camera-eye point of view, which describes details of gesture and expression but never reveals thought or motive directly.

The Thin Man

Hammett’s last novel, The Thin Man, is a return to first-person narration, as Nick Charles, a retired detective, narrates the story of one last case. The novel is in many ways a significant departure from the earlier works, especially in its light comic tone, which helped fit it for popular motion-picture adaptations in a series of “Thin Man” films (though in the book the Thin Man is actually the victim, not the detective). The centerpiece of the book is the relationship between Nick and his young wife, Nora, one of the few happy marriages in modern fiction, based largely on the relationship between Hammett and Lillian Hellman, to whom the book is dedicated.

Hammett’s creation of the hard-boiled detective and the corrupt world in which he works provided the inspiration for his most noteworthy successors, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald (whose detective, Lew Archer, is named for Sam Spade’s partner), and helped make the tough, cynical private eye a key element of American mythology.